Dan, can you tell me what's going on in America's wastewater right now?

I'm going to assume you want me to give the analyst read of what's going on in the wastewater.

The COVID read, not the E. coli read.

Dan Diamond covers health policy and health care over at the Washington Post.

What's going on is that we are paying closer attention to the amount of COVID that is showing up in wastewater.

It's like a passive read. People don't have to go get tested. This is just seeing what is in the sewer system.

And that has shown a spike recently in this BA2 version of Omicron.

Yeah, this is a sub-variant, right?

Yeah, a sub-variant.

What does that mean?

Well, it means nothing good.

It's not just our sewer systems that are hinting at a coming surge.

Cases are up in the U.K., in Hong Kong.

Hospitalizations are on the rise there, too.

And I know what you're thinking.

I don't want to hear a conversation about another COVID surge.

It's what Dan and I are thinking, too.

Yeah, I mean, forgive me that I just have terrible deja vu.

It just, I think I've had this conversation with you four or five times over these two years, where we're bracing

for the possibility of another variant, we're in this case of subvariant coming. We hope that

we're relatively protected, but it's clear in places we're not. Dan says the good thing about our

last COVID surge is that it touched a whole lot of people. He estimates that about 40% of the U.S. got infected this past winter.

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